Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Book Review: Rarity from the Hollow (Robert Eggleton)

Rarity from the Hollow

by: Robert Eggleton

Genres: Adult, Literary, Sci-Fi

Lacy Dawn is a little girl who lives in a magical forest where all the trees love her and she has a space alien friend who adores her and wants to make her queen of the universe. What’s more, all the boys admire her for her beauty and brains. Mommy is very beautiful and Daddy is very smart, and Daddy’s boss loves them all.

Except.

Lacy Dawn, the eleven year old protagonist, perches precariously between the psychosis of childhood and the multiple neuroses of adolescence, buffeted by powerful gusts of budding sexuality and infused with a yearning to escape the grim and brutal life of a rural Appalachian existence. In this world, Daddy is a drunk with severe PTSD, and Mommy is an insecure wraith. The boss is a dodgy lecher, not above leering at the flat chest of an eleven-year-old girl.

Yes, all in one book.

It is a children's story for adults with a happily ever after ending.

Oh god, it's times like these that I really just hate this. I want everyone to have good books so that I don't have to write reviews like this! Ugh.

Now, this isn't REALLY a bad review, because I didn't make it far enough in this book to judge whether or not it's actually BAD. For me, it read a little bit like Room (you can see my review on that here), which was a book that I greatly enjoyed! But this book...I don't know. Let me tell you what it's kind of about.

So, you start with these two fifth grade girls in a clubhouse/box, right? They're studying their spelling words, the usual little girl things. Now, I don't know about you, but anyone younger than 12 in a book gets pictured as a baby. Well, these babies had foul mouths and know waayyyyy too much. So, to begin, less than twenty pages in, I had concluded that this book was for mature readers. That's fine, okay, that's good. I'm fine with that, I can live with it. Well.....what I couldn't deal with was the side glances at abuse and...just..I can't even describe the feeling in my chest when I read the sentence that made me put the tablet down and say "No, nope I can't do it.". The sentence was: "Afterward, her father changed underwear because what he'd worn during the incident was full of cum.".....after beating his daughter to death with a tree limb....wow...

I'm not someone who can stomach abuse, having experienced a form of it before, so I try to shy away from books with abuse as the main theme.

Now, that's not to say that this book wasn't very well written. It, in my opinion, was slightly mature for 12 year old, but that may just be me. I DO want to know what the deal was with DotCom......and the talking to the trees, but I can't make it past the abuse. Sorry, my loves.